Ideal City
In the south-east of Poland, five hours from Warsaw, lies Zamosc, a delightful town founded in the 16th century, designed by a Paduan architect as an ideal city and with its original grid layout still intact. Zamosc provided the setting for ‘Ideal City – Invisible Cities’, an exhibition featuring 40 artists of different generations. Monika Sosnowska’s concrete fountain (A Dirty Fountain, 2006), which combined the ideal proportions of a square with the black water spouting from it, was one of several works created for outdoor spaces. The exhibition also appropriated old fortifications, a synagogue, a former academy and two museums, thus almost completely merging with the city’s existing architecture.
The best integrated works were in the synagogue, where Pedro Cabrita Reis’ steel pipe sculpture Compound # 7 (2006) was erected in the centre of the building, where the bimah once stood. The piece resembled building materials rather than part of a temple destroyed during World War II. Katarzyna Jozefowicz installed her work Games (2002) in the part of the synagogue traditionally reserved for women. The piece consisted of 21,000 cubes made from leaflets found in supermarkets, referring to womanly activities. The spheres of consumption and everyday routine contrasted with the sanctity of a place that, in the Jewish tradition, is reserved solely for men. The work could be taken to refer ultimately to the place of spirituality in a modern city: can a temple that was once devastated – or one that has melted into an urban commercial centre – still serve its sacred function?
Placed near the former town gate, Miroslaw Balka’s Willkommen (Welcome, 2006) was a subtle reference to the relationship between architecture and totalitarianism. During World War II Zamosc functioned as a staging post for Jews being transported to a death camp in the nearby town of Belzec. A fragment of wooden-plank wall referred to the kitchen wall in Auschwitz in front of which the camp band played. Photocells triggered a fragment of Johann Strauss’ Radetzky March, which was performed to greet the newly arriving prisoners. Similarly political was Rula Halawani’s photographic series ‘The Wall’ (2004), which depicted the building of Jerusalem’s new border – an architecture that brutally separates the disputed territory.
In such a military–political context the video Guards (2004–5), by Francis Alÿs and Rafael Ortega, can be read as somewhere between a critical and enthusiastic commentary on ideal geometry. Screened on a wall of the old city defences, the film showed 64 of London's Coldstream Guards converging into a square formation and then moving along deserted streets. Initially, each member of the troop walks at his own pace. Gradually, they settle into a synchronized rhythm, and their movements become almost uniform. They eventually reach Southwark bridge where, on the word of command, they end their monotonous march and scatter. The illusion of perfect geometry vanishes.
Projects for ideal cities have rarely been carried out; the vast majority were left unrealized or exist only as literary descriptions. Hence part of the exhibition was devoted to cities occupying the spheres of memory or the imagination. The Mirror Suitcase Man (2004), an intriguing video by Rui Calçada Bastos, is a Surrealist vision in which we see only scraps of reality: a fragment of a silhouette wandering through a city and images reflected in his mirrored suitcase. Yet the actual city is absent – we see empty spaces, parks or views ‘enclosed’ in the suitcase, which is eventually intercepted by somebody else. Melanie Smith’s aerial photographs of Mexico City (Spiral City, 2002) depict a city lacking movement and passers-by – there is nothing but the ominous geometrical grid of endless streets.
According to the curators, the ideal city and its invisible counterpart relate not only to proportions but also, above all, to ideal social systems. The exhibition suggested that the theme of an ideal city has become a pretext for artists and curators to sink into a rather sceptical and gloomy perception of architecture as oppressive rather than as a setting for amusement or spirituality. They seem to forget that the ideal urban plans of the Renaissance were also intended to correspond to the divine order. The exhibition combines geometry with politics, and the artists, after critical analyses of Modernist Utopias, find it hard to summon carefree optimism. But a walk through a somewhat forgotten and dusty Zamosc does not exactly evoke a sense of optimism either. A futuristic video by David Maljkovic, For a New Heritage (2004), is set in Croatia in the year 2045: in search of their heritage three men visit an aluminium Modernist monument. None of them seems to understand its meaning. We should cling to the hope that in 2045 artists will no longer need to burden their memories with the failures of the past.
